From the different Mario spin offs, the Yoshi series feels like the most enduring, but also the one drawing most on Mario’s past, using enemies and really just being story prequels with a different protagonist. At the same time, it experiments more than Mario platformers have done for a while and they have felt different. The childish, thick lined graphics alone give it their identity.

Yoshi Touch & Go is the sub franchise’s new contribution to the DS, the other being the DS port of Yoshi’s Island. Its control scheme, its unique point, is different…

Our Thoughts

In this game, you guide Yoshi by drawing clouds on the touch screen. He’ll keep walking or falling and you need to draw clouds on the bottom screen to guide him. When falling, that means anticipating what is coming, while when walking you’re staying ahead of that. You get the option to tap for a jump and to trap enemies in bubbles as well as creating cloud paths, but it’s still all indirect.

I’ll be honest, it’s fiddly and I don’t love it. At the same time, the game seems to be set up for that, with the challenge often being how long or how far you can hold on. Without save games or many real checkpoints, you’re really doing a score attack on an infinite runner, but in a game that presents itself as a platformer instead.

What adds to that is that the game can be incredibly dense with enemies and the hitboxes are fiddly and difficult to predict – you have less room than you think and can quickly lose out. You can capture enemies in bubbles to get rid of them, but you don’t always have time.

The game’s art is still gorgeous, with a hand drawn style that sets it apart from the rest of the Mario series. It’s a fun world and everything in the game seems to reflect that, even if it belies the actual difficulty.

Final Thoughts

Yoshi Touch & Go feels like a bit of a misleading game, the focus of the game seems a bit different from the platformers we normally see from the series. There’s some platforming, but the classic controls are missing and the challenges feel quite different to me. It’s fun once I got into that side of the game, even if I guess I didn’t get as far as I could.